Michael Rubin: Ethiopia’s hydro-hegemony has arrived

Recommendable! Apparently, Ethiopia has a history of taking unilateral action on harnessing international water resources at the detriment of its neighbor countries.

"... Ethiopia has repeatedly failed to negotiate in good faith. In 2007, the Eastern Nile Technical Regional Office of the Nile Basin Initiative—an intergovernmental partnership comprising ten Nile Basin countries including Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt—reportedly concluded that the optimum storage capacity for a hydroelectric dam in the location where Addis Ababa would eventually build the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam was 14.47 billion cubic meters. That number is less than one-fifth of what Ethiopia later constructed. ...
While taking unilateral actions that could impact 98 percent of Egyptians might appear a casus belli—a justifiable one—Ethiopian water unilateralism is not new. Consider Ethiopia’s Gibe dams on the Omo River basin: Ethiopia’s unilateral damming, especially in the Omo River basin, including the Gibe cascade,  devastated the UNESCO-listed Lake Turkana in  Kenya. Its actions threatened the existence of the lake and exacerbated both hunger and conflict in the surrounding areas. Ethiopian actions—taken absent consultation with Kenya—may replicate the Aral Sea disaster in East Africa. ..."

Ethiopia’s hydro-hegemony has arrived | American Enterprise Institute - AEI The dam dispute between Ethiopia and Egypt most often garners international press, but the cases impacting Kenya and Somalia show that the pattern of Ethiopian defiance of international norms cuts deeper.